Seddülbahir

By Nora Byrne

It comes quicker than you think and goes the same way. After a measure or two, a time signature starts to emerge and quickly loses meaning, turning on a decade built on years that forever start in March. 

It comes in a single glance, or a sudden memory, an inward cringe, and a small cry to remind you that you’re fragile, scarred with both meaningless anecdotes and fervent daydreams. Wash and worry, gaze into mirrors, into skylines, into the space between the bridge of a stranger’s nose and the corner of their eye. They’ve lives of their own, long histories that build in layers and must be unpacked, one by one, sifted through like so many grains of bloodstained sand. 

I used to bathe in those wavelengths that came from unreliable brain chemistry across a sparsely lit room, but lost them somewhere and felt little desire to find them again. That’s for a summer, autumn, and springtime of affection that had pressed into one and led me shivering to the cold intimacy of the indoor and indecent. We spoke absolute bullshit in tongues that wouldn’t be learned without touching, tracing flesh around the ribs, and toying with the time between fervent and fallow. 

Truncate that thought. There lies in the time when thoughts come and fail to go but rather nestle insidiously a necessity to prune, to select and release those that whisper bitter nothings to an ego barely functioning, that circle back in the daylight to dim the light of the sun. They exist only in the cruel drama of those who ascribe to ennui like a religion, who cling to distance like they do lovers.

Watch treetops wither and blossoms fade, eager and early in the frenetic tail of winter, frozen voiceless and fruitless on new branches that sprawled out in the warm months preceding the chill we knew would happen as we told them to wait, as we mourned them in advance. 

Those sunny days of almost spring when we walked along the water, along the road, half-masked and criminal with beers in our pockets and refuse in our hands. We wandered by piles of plastic that had risen from the sea, trash Aphrodites nestling in the sand mixing chemicals with the salt, stole sticks from the sand, and waved our naked standards all the way to the graveyard, still and silent on the hillside. Her life’s tragedies could have been many things, and she chose love. 

Her life’s tragedy was love, so she leaned in and lived it. She drank to distraction, pantsless and pedantic in the winey wake of midnight, dedicated to an open heart that bled with a steady and infatuating honesty. I preferred to haunt the vintage graves, high-minded and self-flagellating, broken by basic human folly and reveling in the pettiness of the fantasies and the bitter sadness I had carried with me into the raging winds of war tourism and provincialism. Here I found myself silent and ponderous, a brittle pride kept intact by the pretentious misery of history and a near-fanatical fear of histrionics I indulged in my silent strolls through the graves.

These thoughts come more quickly than you think and go the same way. You’re left with soft paper between your fingers, a paper that smells like piss and lavender, smelling like something missing, or healing, or something you’ve never known before, or knew long ago. Step away through the subtle smoke of commuter shipyards, of cigarettes hissing in paper cups; walk through each room and remove your clothes until you’re shimmering instead of soaked, hang them on the balcony in the howling wind and rain.

Take these thoughts out of rotation and leave them lonely, leave them next to the shells of memorialized nonsense that feature in minds loose in a minefield of half-truths and institutionalized intention. Here we stayed lost in histories we would never remember, paying tribute to the nameless by the cold marble one of the republics had left in place of bodies lost in the sea, the laudable kind of mass grave that lies protected and peaceful under the watchful eye of olive trees and cypress, the kind that hides under a title, a flag, any trapping of civilized behavior I ached to believe the unnamed had clung to as they sank to the soft, sedimentary bed of the Dardanelles, soothed by notoriety that seems to some a meaning in death.

I found tragedies heavier than my own, wavered weak-kneed at the foot of the eighteen-year-old namesake whose parents hadn’t the means, the motive, the opportunity to distinguish him beyond the name they’d given him, the name that blended with so many others and drew me to honor what may have been martyrdom, but felt like ritual sacrifice in a morbid sculpture garden forever touched by a northern breeze that alternated between sunny, biting and melancholic.

And on the way back we sank our faces into the flowers on the almond trees, sweet and soft and so before their time. We spoke of looming snowfall and cold frost, using low voices so as to let them live their final days, desperate in the way we drank their fragrance, sadness in the last leg as we strolled back to the windy, waterlogged house where we lay lost in futile blossoms, in lines of rubbish next to the waves, in lines of graves that ornamented the seaside and in the hazy drunkenness of tragedy we took the luxury to choose. 

Nora Byrne was born by the Lamprey River in rural New Hampshire and came to Istanbul by way of the desert. She works as an artist and writer creating critical reflections on ideas of place and urban landscapes and has been featured in the Bosporus Review for both writing & design. She keeps a studio at Nadas Istanbul and is an active participant in the Mahalla Festival, an art festival occurring annually throughout Istanbul that responds to the city and its intricacies.